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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.1 | The History Cooperative
103.1  
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March, 2007
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Reviews

The Indiana Rail Road Company
America's New Regional Railroad

By Christopher Rund
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 254. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $45.00.)

The stunning revival of freight railroads in North America after 1980 included structural changes in the industry. One of these was that trunk railroads divested themselves of secondary lines that served mostly local traffic. Where there remained enough local traffic to sustain a railroad, and where local entrepreneurs could be persuaded to take a gamble, these routes were "spun off" as independent short lines. If they were large enough, they were called "regional railroads." 1
      This book is the story of one of those spin-offs, the Indiana Rail Road, formerly the Indianapolis branch of the former Illinois Central. The line was the product of dubious nineteenth-century dreams. Portions of it were conceived in the short-lived narrow-gauge craze that swept the country in the 1880s. The final result was a route that wobbled from Effingham, Illinois, northeastward through Bloomington, Indiana, to Indianapolis. The wheezing little line was known for one of the engineering mini-marvels of the late nineteenth century—the bridge over Richland Creek near the settlement of Tulip, Indiana, famous locally as the Tulip Trestle. The line went bankrupt, and the Illinois Central acquired it in 1911 at foreclosure. . . .
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